THE ONLY ENEMIES ARE DOMESTIC POLITICAL ENEMIES: Uh, Oh, Again: Homeland Security Role in Bizarre Election Day “Tabletop Exercise” Denied: Organizers of a Election Day cyber exercise suddenly repudiate their own announcement of Homeland Security involvement. What gives? Plus, a peek at new DHS FOIA material.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, has been the subject of multiple Racket stories in recent years. A year ago, we followed up a House Weaponization of Government Committee report with Twitter Files documents detailing the Homeland Security agency’s help forming the Election Integrity Partnership at Stanford, which mass-flagged social media content in the last presidential election.

Now, a week before another presidential vote, the agency again stepped in it, in a seeming effort to quell conspiracy theories that are almost certain to achieve the opposite.

CISA went unintentionally viral in recent weeks when its participation in a “large scale” cybersecurity exercise on Election Day in Atlanta was announced by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA). When Kentucky Senator Rand Paul sent DHS chief Alejandro Mayorkas a WTF letter, CISA said the event was canceled. Now, despite both DHS and CISA being listed as “pivotal organizations” at the event, with the Election Day exercise scheduled to be led by a CISA official named Klint Walker, the organizers, i.e. the people who wrote the brochure below, are reportedly telling reporters DHS/CISA had “no involvement” with the event.

CISA, meanwhile, has just sent a letter to Paul’s office. “While conference organizers invited Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) officials to attend this year,” Director Jen Easterly writes, “no CISA employees will be attending either the conference or preconference exercise.”

Surprised staff in Paul’s office are responding to media queries by sending out copies of original documents showing scheduled DHS/CISA participation. You can expect new denials to hit large news organizations as soon as tonight, with the result that a tale once destined to be a footnote to Election Day may now blow up into something larger and weirder.

Trump supporters need to be ready to defend democracy, I guess.